What I feel now, mostly, is something closer to distance. Like Brian is a picture I used to keep on the wall, and I took it down, and now there’s just a pale rectangle where it hung. And someday I’ll paint over that too.
The judge made him pay for what he broke. Every dollar. Every drywall patch. Every gallon of water.
Ezoic
And I was glad she did. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t. There’s something important about being told, in a courtroom, by a stranger in a black robe, Yes. This happened. It was wrong. And it’s his to pay for, not yours.
Ezoic
But the money wasn’t what healed me.
What healed me was kneeling on that living room floor and watching my quiet father pick up the pieces of my grandmother’s mirror one at a time, with his big scarred hands, like they were alive. What healed me was him standing up in a too-big suit and telling the truth when nobody asked him to. What healed me was a carpenter named Abe in a barn two towns over, carving a single new petal on a wooden rose so carefully that I had to look three times to find it.
